Gamification: Who Says Serious Business Can’t Be Good Fun?

Brand advocacy empowers those who know and trust your brand by inviting them to vouch for it on social media. However, simply establishing a community of advocates is not enough to ensure its longevity; methods, such as gamification, need to be put in place to engage advocates in the long run and let them know that advocating for your company is worth their precious time.

Serious business and good fun are not mutually exclusive; the content advocates share may well be linked to major company activity (hence the importance of training), but that doesn’t mean the advocate experience can’t be entertaining. In fact, injecting a little competition goes a long way to driving advocates’ continued motivation and boosting the effect their sharing activity has on the overall objectives of your brand advocacy initiative.

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With Regular Campaigns, Content Sharing Is Never Boring

Gamification fosters collaboration and encourages peer support through challenges that are fun, but nevertheless tied to serious bottom line goals. Campaigns can be launched every week, month or quarter according to your marketing objectives; and, with new prizes and perks up for grabs each time, they keep advocates on their toes.

Gamification campaigns can also be tailor-made for specific groups of advocates in order to pinpoint their interests, tap into their competitive streak and channel both into productive sharing activity. Whether you launch a product-oriented campaign for sales teams or a blog-focused challenge for content marketers; make sure you incorporate badges and certifications. They serve as tangible proof of the time and energy that advocates invest; which provide them with an incentive to keep coming back for more.

Linking Fun and Gamification to Serious KPIs

Gamification leaderboards are doubly beneficial. Not only do they spur on advocates by allowing them to compare their progress to that of their teammates and competitors; they also provide an easy way for managers to identify and reward the most active advocates. When linked to other metrics, these results provide quantifiable KPIs that relate directly to content marketing objectives.

Let’s say you choose to promote all content relating to a new product launch during a two-week gamification campaign. During those two weeks, advocates compete for points and prizes by sharing specially selected posts on their own social networks. At the end of the campaign, you link advocates’ scores with social media metrics such as new followers, likes and end user shares; determining which advocates have driven the most social media engagement.

But in order to get the most out of the gamification campaign, there is something else you can do. By linking social media analytics to metrics that track the traffic landing on your website, you can track the correlation between advocates’ sharing activity, end user engagement on social networks, and the traffic that is driven to product pages.

Everybody Loves a Competition

Bestowing the title of brand advocate is only the beginning; in order to keep employees, clients, partners or fans engaged, you must give them the opportunity to strive for further recognition. Gamification allows you to do this through innovative challenges that have the added bonus of turbo-charging advocates’ sharing activity. Let the games begin!